Pigeon racing competition is an annual great event in Taiwan and is famed for its huge purses offered to owners of the winner pigeons. This makes more than thirty-thousand pigeon owners participate in the contest every year and put all their efforts in order to win the huge purses. It is thus not hard to expect how tough the competition would be. Under such strong competitiveness, only a few owners may succeed and raise winner pigeons.
Racing pigeons are young pigeons. Most of them belong to good breeds, and are chosen, raised and trained carefully by the owners. A baby racing pigeon, generally on the sixth day of its birth, is allowed to wear a pigeon ring, wherein the pigeon ring usually contains an electronic ring and a numeric ring. After wearing the pigeon ring for one or two months, each racing pigeon must be brought to the pigeon-racing association where the racing pigeon is registered and an electronic data file is established for the pigeon. The electronic data file contains pictures of the electronic ring, the numeric ring and feather images of the pigeon.
The electronic ring of the pigeon ring usually includes a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) module for being detected by a pigeon clock device (for example, an RFID sensing panel) when a racing pigeon wearing the pigeon ring arrives in the destination. The pigeon clock is connected to a Global Positioning System (GPS) module. The GPS module can perform global positioning and time-setting in order to prevent cheats from occurrence between two racing camps A and B that are located in difference places. Particularly, two different locations are chosen from a designated racing route to build two racing camps A and B, and the racing pigeons are raised alternatively in the two camps. In a racing competition, the racing pigeons fly initially until they enter the B camp, and then they are carried by vehicles through the highway to the A camp. By the tracking and positioning function of the GPS module, it may prevent cheaters from illegally relocating the pigeon clock to another camp. This is the first cheat-preventing mechanism.
For an official pigeon racing competition, young racing pigeons are brought to the pigeon-racing association, the pigeon clock is rectified, and the contest data are inputted to the pigeon clock. Conventionally, in order to prevent cheats, besides writing contest codes into the electronic ring, a small piece of newspaper is cut in two such that one half is placed inside the numeric ring and the other half is put into files for records. Then, the numeric ring is enclosed by a sticker, making the racing pigeon not able to be tracked down according to a given number. Once the above is done, the racing pigeons are gathered in a pigeon collecting cage, keeping them free of touch from their owners. When a racing pigeon reaches the destination, the half piece of newspaper placed inside the numeric ring is taken out and compared with the other half piece stored in the records to see if the two pieces match, so as to prevent illegal substitution of racing pigeons. This is how the second cheat-preventing mechanism works.
Even with the above two cheat-preventing mechanisms, since the second mechanism requires much manual operation to carry out comparison and verification of the two half pieces of newspaper, it often causes cheats and unfair competition results. Therefore, the problem to be solved here is to provide a cheat-preventing system and method, which can allow the pigeon racing competition to proceed fairly, safely and without much manpower, in order to avoid cheats as desired.